Embroidery with my Mother 

Two bed sheets embroidered by different hands hang near or opposite to each other. One is blue and the other a mauve purple. One is covered in flowers, the other words. An audio track plays voices in conversation, both soft, but one softer. There are memories, questions, replies, interruptions, pauses… these are the voices of my mother and me. We are sitting on her bed sewing, hands occupied as we share space and time, re-connecting and re-assembling the past together. 

Once, my mother and I were both technically refugees. However, she remembers it, and I don’t. I was born in 1988, in a small village called Nzara, Sudan. It is not on many maps. My mom left once before, in 1965 to what was then Zaire. She returned to Sudan, and then left again with me as a baby on her back, my young sisters in tow, in 1990. She slept during the day and walked at night, for 2 weeks to reach what is now the Congo. We left again for Uganda in 1993. I went to live with my American father there and in the summer of 1994 was sent without her to the U.S. 

I didn’t see her again for 8 years. 

This project weaves traditional milaya embroidery of South Sudan and a childlike stitching of my own with our voices, and the time that we spent together. To do so was to begin reclaiming a fraction of the time that we both lost, so long ago.